A republican form of government presupposes self-government —
the capacity of citizens to govern themselves according to reason
— and does not, if it intends to survive, champion them as
“victims” when they don’t. But the shocking lack of self-government
demonstrated by New Orleanians is the one area of government that
our republic’s vapid media won’t scrutinize in their post-mortems
on the city’s collapse.
Reporters keep shaking their fists at “the government,” as if
America were not a republic but a statist autocracy in which remote
rulers can snap their fingers and make problems vanish for their
subjects. Reporters also keep saying that the government’s response
last week was “embarrassing.” What I find more embarrassing is the
media’s infantilizing of New Orleans citizens who chose not to
evacuate despite loud and obvious warnings. Does personal
responsibility mean nothing at this point? Aren’t citizens “the
government” too? What’s disgraceful, and positively dangerous, in a
republic that depends on self-reliance is a media that encourages a
culture of victimization.
An honest media in a republic not wobbling toward statism would
— while acknowledging that some citizens couldn’t evacuate for
reasons beyond their control and showing compassion for those who
could but foolishly didn’t — stop infantilizing and romanticizing
these citizens as “victims” of government indifference.
An honest media would acknowledge that the civilizational vacuum
into which New Orleans evaporated last week began with a breakdown
of self-government and the absence of civilization’s first
government — the family. The absence of fathers, not FEMA,
explains the images of women and children stranded in the storm.
The absence of culture transmitted through stable families, not the
absence of government money (gobs of which have been poured into
New Orleans for decades to no effect), explains the Lord of the
Flies scenario that took shape not after days of desperate
privation but immediately once opportunities for looting presented
themselves.
In their scattershot criticism of the federal government’s
response, the media have demonstrated a childish petulance — a
juvenile demand born of the expectation of instant gratification
that the government wave a wand and solve all problems — while
ignoring the most obvious causes contributing to the crisis. Causes
that have nothing to do with the structures of this or that
government agency. Causes that no faked-up commission in
Washington, D.C. can solve. Causes that will produce fresh crises
long after the media have pressured the government into the most
bogus and superficial fixes.
All of these problems require changes in self-government, not
the federal government. But a liberal ideology that refuses to call
pathologies by their proper name circumscribes the whole
discussion, guaranteeing that these problems will never be solved.
Indeed, judging by the frequency of the Jesse Jacksons and Al
Sharptons on television this week, those who excused and advanced
these pathologies will get new “leadership” chances to compound
them.
“We have gotten our media back,” Bill Maher and others have
burbled, slapping the Anderson Coopers on the back for holding the
government “accountable.” Actually, the media will hold nobody,
save for a few political figures they detest, accountable. They
aren’t holding looters accountable but giving Al Sharpton a
platform to justify the looting. They aren’t holding citizens who
were told repeatedly to evacuate and didn’t evacuate accountable,
though their recklessness put a lot of Coast Guardsmen and rescuers
at serious risk. Yes, government agencies owe citizens help. But
citizens who through their own heedlessness put government rescuers
into a near-impossible spot are in no position to gainsay the
help.
The storyline of New Orleanians as victims and government
responders as villains is just one more outrageous item in the
media’s voluminous catalogue of victimization. No reasonable
calculus of accountability is ever brought to bear in these tales.
Whether it’s needle-using, promiscuous AIDS patients or cigarette
smokers or litigants in some self-propelled accident, the media
will absolve the person who contributed most directly to the
problem of responsibility while searching frantically for some
nebulously malign force external to the person to villainize. Yet
by their own standards of indulgence — if they can rationalize the
decisionmaking of citizens who are told to evacuate but don’t, why
aren’t they similarly tolerant of inadequate planning by FEMA? —
their ferocious appetite for blame appears utterly capricious.
But worse than that, it is destructive to the life of a
republic, rendering individuals passive and derelict at the very
moment its survival requires more not less self-government.
